The invention relates to a clustering technique for cyclic phenomena. For instance, the invention can be used to process data arrays that collectively describe cyclic behavior of one or more variables in several entities in a physical process.
Clustering techniques, such as k-means algorithms, hierarchical clustering techniques, self-organizing maps, or the like, are widely used to analyze the variable behavior in physical processes. In order to provide a concrete but non-limiting example, the physical process can be the operation of cellular a telecommunication network, each of the several entities may be a cell or some other resource of that network and the one or more variables may be performance indicators, such as amount of traffic, usage of resources, number (or percentage) of dropped connections, or the like.
Prior clustering techniques suffer from the drawback that large amounts of useful information is ignored.